WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama projects that his new plan for reducing the federal debt will save more than $3 trillion over the next decade. But independent budget experts said the blueprint Obama unveiled Monday — which White House officials say would save more than $4 trillion when added to earlier budget deals this year — appears to fall short of his target.

The plan also relies on an array of well-worn budget ploys that do little to advance the cause of bipartisan cooperation in taming the nation's spiraling debt, the experts said.

According to White House estimates, the new framework would require $6.6 trillion in fresh government borrowing over the next decade. That's only slightly less borrowing than projected in the budget framework Obama proposed in April.

Both parties, in their budget talks this summer, set an even earlier White House budget proposal submitted in February as the benchmark for measuring deficit savings. Against that standard, the new debt-reduction plan saves $3 trillion over the next decade — well short of the $4 trillion target.

New plan hardly new?

The latest Obama plan "doesn't produce any more in realistic savings than the plan they offered in April," said Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. "They've filled in details, repackaged it and replaced one gimmick with another. They don't even stabilize the debt. This is just not enough."

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The most disheartening development, MacGuineas and others said, is Obama's decision to count $1.1 trillion in savings from the drawdown of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan toward his debt-reduction total. Because Obama has no intention of continuing war spending at last year's elevated levels, that $1.1 trillion would never have been spent.

Obama's proposals to overhaul the tax code also drew criticism. In his previous budgets, Obama has measured his policies against a baseline that assumes a continuation of tax cuts for the middle class enacted under President George W. Bush, which are due to expire. Because Obama wants to extend the tax cuts, the assumption permits him to do so without appearing to make annual budget deficits worse.

"Fictitious savings"

This month, however, the White House began using a new baseline that assumes continuation of all Bush-era tax cuts, including those for high earners. This approach, as one senior GOP aide put it, allows Obama to claim "fictitious savings" of $866 billion over the next decade by letting the tax cuts expire for high earners.

Even the rhetorical centerpiece of Obama's plan — a new millionaire's tax named after investor Warren Buffett — appeared to be more symbol than substance, tax experts said.

The rest of Obama's tax plan was largely a repackaging of previous proposals that have gone nowhere in Congress.

Obama called again for an overhaul of the corporate tax code, but there were few new details of how the administration would tackle that task.

Many of the measures have appeared in previous Obama budgets and in legislation he unveiled this month to pay for a $447 billion jobs bill.

"It's all stuff that's been in the budget before," said Ken Kies, a longtime corporate tax lobbyist. "There's absolutely nothing new here."

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